The Man Who Couldn't Take It Anymore

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Tonight, breaking news as we come on the air, Defense Secretary James Mattis is out, sending his resignation to the President.

It comes to...

Now I've got a resignation letter here from General Mattis, the Defense Secretary.

Defense Secretary James Mattis surprised President Trump when he handed him his resignation letter.

This according to sources, a letter that has sent shockwaves across Washington and the world.

This is Radio Atlantic.

I'm Isaac Dover.

Nine months ago, Secretary of Defense James Mattis resigned.

It's easy to forget those big moments given what politics is like these days.

The news was quickly eclipsed by the government shutdown then, and there have been many, many big moments since.

But it was, by any measure, one of the most significant events of the Trump presidency so far.

His departure surprised the president and the nation, not to mention many concerned allies.

Mattis was the last so-called adult in the room for Trump's White House.

H.R.

McMaster, John Kelly, Rex Tillerson.

These were supposedly checks on the president, and they were gone.

Mattis was the last to go.

Well, now he's finally speaking up with a new book coming out next week.

Our editor-in-chief, Jeff Goldberg, has known Mattis for a long time.

He's been talking to him since his departure, and in the most recent issue of the magazine, he's written about those conversations.

And today, he's here in studio to talk with me about them.

Jeff, welcome back to Radio Atlantic.

Thank you.

You know, I used to be the host of this show.

I know, so what does it feel like to be on the other side?

Uncomfortable and sort of elegiac.

Yeah, well, we'll see if we can make it.

I think I'm going to take over again.

Well, Isaac, you are the boss.

Out of here.

Out of the seat.

No, no, I think you're doing a fantastic job.

I speak on behalf of all of our listeners when I say you're doing a fantastic job.

And you know, you went from threatening to that, and I don't know if it's going to work for you.

Yeah, it's bipolar, just like the subject of our conversation.

And I don't mean Jim Mattis.

Well, so let's go back to what that moment was when Mattis resigned.

It was last December.

It was right before the government shutdown happened, right before Christmas.

And Mattis surprised everybody by saying that's it.

He turned in a resignation letter.

He had had this meeting with Trump in the Oval Office.

What has that meant?

Why did that matter so much then, given what we've seen so far, do you think, since then?

Aaron Powell,

like you said, he was the grown-up in the room.

He obviously has the most sensitive job in the government,

especially when you have an erratic president.

I mean, because Jim Mattis, the defense secretary, is going to be the

brakes or the switch between a president and the nuclear arsenal that the president commands.

So there was always in the backdrop, everybody was thinking, well, the president is erratic, but you got a grown-up like Jim Mattis, who will literally tackle the president if you have to in order to keep him from doing something dumb.

So his departure scared the hell out of a lot of people.

I want to say this, though.

It wasn't,

for people who are watching, it wasn't that much of a surprise.

If there's any surprise about Jim Mattis' second year in office was that he was lasting as long as he did.

In his first year, he was esteemed and the president seemed to have respect for him.

By the second year, you know, like, I don't know who made this expression up, but everyone has a half-life with Donald Trump.

And he reached his half-life, you know, somewhere about a year before he resigned.

And then things started to deteriorate.

Why do you think he reached the half-life?

Because he was disagreeing with Trump?

Because he wasn't doing his own.

Because he was slow-walking Trump.

There was the Woodward book in which Mattis is purported to say that Trump is the, I can't remember the exact quote, but it was something about talking to a sixth grader.

There was, you know,

what was coming through or was leaking, even though mattis himself wasn't a leaker what was coming through was that jim mattis like almost every other serious person in the administration thought of um donald trump as immature and on you know incurious and and all the rest um and i think in any case as you well know trump just gets tired of people around him and they all have half-lives and once you hit your half-life your your your disintegration um begins the the the thing that brought uh mattis closest to resigning before this was the decision by Trump to overrule Mattis on his choice for the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

It's always the Secretary of Defense's prerogative to name a person.

Presidents very rarely intervene in that.

They usually just rubber stamp it.

Mattis wanted Goldfein, the head of the Air Force.

Trump wanted Milley, the head of the Army.

And that

upending of tradition, from what I understand, really infuriated Mattis.

But Mattis was sticking with it.

There was a period right before the resignation in which,

if you recall, I mean, this was 97,000 controversies ago, but Trump deployed troops to the Mexican border, the U.S.-Mexico border to deal with the

supposed emergency that required the United States military to intervene.

And Mattis went along with it.

And Mattis's view, as I understand it, was that

my job is not to agree with the president's policy prescriptions.

If it's legal, and if it is not immoral, then I will do it.

And he could not find a reason that this was illegal or immoral.

Of course, U.S.

troops had been deployed in previous presidencies to the border.

And Mattis basically built a system where the troops weren't going to be armed and there was going to be no possibility of confrontation with immigrants.

Nevertheless, a lot of critics said, oh, Jim Mattis, what are you doing?

You know, you're now abetting a racist and all the rest.

But he stuck with it.

But the Syria decision,

Trump's impetuous announcement, which was of course later reversed, that he was going to pull all U.S.

troops out of Syria and turn over the fight against ISIS to whoever,

that was too much.

That was too much for Mattis.

Why is that the thing?

Mattis had spent most of his career in the Middle East fighting extremists of one kind or another.

And this is not a quote I got from Jim Mattis.

And we'll talk about this in a minute, I assume, the fact that Jim Mattis is not

telling us all that he thinks and feels about Donald Trump.

And that was part of the tension, if you will, of my conversations with him, where I was pushing him to say something in advance of the 2020 election.

You know Donald Trump better than almost anyone.

What do you think?

But

when he went into Donald Trump in the Oval Office, he asked for an hour with the president over the Syria issue.

He spent a half hour arguing.

with the president, do not pull Jewish troops out of Syria.

We have not beaten ISIS.

We have to be on the ground, at least advising our allies.

In any case, if we abandon our allies,

what does that make us?

Obviously, that's not an an argument that usually appeals to Donald Trump.

But put that aside,

about a half hour in, he looked at the president and said, you know, the next Secretary of Defense is going to have to lose to ISIS.

I'm not doing it.

It was almost a point of pride.

It was

a point of experience.

It was a bridge that he couldn't cross.

He felt that the president was setting the United States up for failure in Syria, failure against ISIS, and he wasn't going to participate.

He spent

not just that meeting, but he spent obviously months, years fighting ISIS, and

he couldn't take it.

He just couldn't do it.

Do you think that there has been a clear effect of Jim Mattis not being there as it's been playing out in what Trump has done, how the administration has been working?

We've had an acting Defense Secretary and now that person did not become the Defense Secretary, another Defense Secretary.

Is it?

We haven't had the crisis yet

that would truly truly illustrate the impact of his absence.

Maybe when there was the

in June when there was going to be the bombing of Iran and Trump apparently 10 minutes before the bombs were to drop.

Yeah, I think Mattis in the system at that moment would have made Trump clear,

made the consequences of that decision clear to Trump.

He might have done it anyway.

Look, the point is, is that Jim Mattis himself was feeling ineffectual.

He was feeling that he had lost his ability to sway the president, just like many, many people

who have quit this administration.

So, so the Jim Mattis of 2018 wasn't the Jim Mattis of 2017.

In terms of his ability to influence the president, remember when he was first hired in the job, Trump was in awe of him.

Yeah, I remember I was at a rally.

It was one of the post-election rallies that Trump was doing in that weird period during the transition where he would still go out on the road.

And we were in North Carolina.

And that was the night that he had nominated Mattis or announced Mattis and he brought him out onto stage and he said, this is Mad Dog Mattis.

And Mattis was clearly uncomfortable.

Well, it's a nickname that he hates.

Nobody actually calls him Mad Dog.

Right.

And

also, he didn't want to be on stage at the political rally, clearly.

Why would you?

And it was

a Trump rally in every way that it is, which is not Jim Mattis' natural environment.

No, Trump loved the image of Jim Mattis.

But when Jim Mattis started saying to him,

allies are important.

continuity is important, stability of decision-making is important,

fighting,

not giving in to not believing, let's say, North Korean propaganda is important.

When this president doesn't want to hear something, he doesn't want to hear something.

And so what you do is in this administration, and this is not just Jim Mattis.

Jim Mattis started with more capital in the bank, but what you do is you spend down.

You just spend down over time.

And by 2018, to 2018, he had spent down.

So this goes back to your original question.

What is the consequence of not having Jim Mattis in the system?

Day to day, not much.

We have a Secretary of Defense now who doesn't have the stature.

We had an acting Secretary of Defense who didn't have the stature.

We haven't had that, let's just say that nuclear moment.

And I mean that literally.

The moment when a Secretary of Defense has to go to the president and say, I know you want to do X, or you don't want to do X, but here's the decision that you have to make, and you must listen to me.

When Jim Mattis does it, four-star general, former NATO Supreme Commander for Transformation, former CENTCOM commander,

most revered living Marine, war fighter in Fallujah, everything.

When he does that, for most audiences, most audiences internally go, oh, Jim Mattis believes we should do X.

Maybe we should do it.

Donald Trump was probably going to be impervious anyway, but we'll find out in the fullness.

And we can't prove this.

We can't prove what the absence of someone means in a system that is built to cater to the whims and sometimes irrational decisions, impetuous decisions of the president.

But yeah, I mean, if the question is,

should it make American citizens more nervous that Jim Mattis is not in the system?

The answer is fairly obvious.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: I will say that I talked to William Perry, one of the defense secretaries for Bill Clinton, a year and a half ago, and

one of the points that he makes is that it's not true that a president can be stopped by the Secretary of Defense in ordering a nuclear strike.

That is

something that we have in our heads as something that's there.

But the chain of command does not include the Secretary of Defense.

No, the Secretary of Defense should be in the consultative phase.

Right, but if the President says do it, then the Secretary of Defense cannot be.

Look, people need to understand, this is the most important question that we've faced, even though we don't think about it very often since the introduction of nuclear weapons into our arsenal.

The president is a democratically elected leader who is a nuclear monarch, an absolute monarch.

The president can pick up the phone once he opens the football and proves that he is the president and calls Stratcom, says, bomb Russia, bomb China, bomb North Korea, do the following thing.

Yeah,

here's the operational plan.

Go forward.

You're supposed to have the Defense Secretary on the phone when that happens.

Remember, you have very little time sometimes to make these decisions.

But yeah, no, the Defense Secretary is not the person who can veto.

Nobody can veto this.

It's a president.

The president is chosen by the people to make these life and death decisions.

President is commander-in-chief, and he tells his commanders to go bomb something, they bomb something.

So let's take a step back here.

You thought it was important to chase down Jim Mannis to hear what he has to say about this.

How do you chase down is a lot of emailed him, but yes, I get your point.

Well, how is it that he comes into your life?

When do you get to know him?

How does he come into my life?

You make this sound so romantic.

Iraq, I think.

I mean, I've known him for a really long time.

When he was, I think I first, if I remember correctly, I met him when he was a two-star in Iraq around the time of the Fallujah campaign or probably even before that.

And he was well known.

I mean, he is unusually, this word is always used as a kind of insult for people, but I don't mean it at all.

It's unusually articulate.

He has a folksy, very clear way of speaking.

And so he had become known in journalism circles for that.

For giving a savvy guy.

He's a great warfighter.

And he's also known as one of the great scholars

of warfighting, of empire building.

I mean, he has this huge library, as everybody knows, and he reads all the time.

That's one of the reasons, by the way, when he was picked to be Secretary of Defense.

I thought, whoa, this is not going to work because one of these guys reads and one of these guys don't.

You know?

And I was right about that, by the way.

I think that Jim Mattis has contempt for people who don't read history.

And

one day when Jim Mattis is more forthcoming, I imagine that that's something he's going to say, that you really shouldn't vote for a president who doesn't read books.

We're going to take a quick break and we'll be back with more with Jeff Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

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And we're back talking with Jeff Goldberg about Jim Mattis.

So you decide that you want to get him to talk.

You knew this book was coming out.

Yeah, yeah.

And you start emailing him.

What

was he reluctant at first to talk?

No, I mean he wants to sell the book, obviously.

He has a book that's coming out.

It's a very interesting book, actually.

It's a management book, mainly a leadership book.

It's quasi-autobiographical, so those parts are very interesting.

There's a lot about the Battle of Fallujah, for instance.

There's a lot about

his earlier career.

So obviously he's

and you'll see in the story that

he's trying to walk a line that's not really walkable.

He's written this leadership book and this manual for managers and executives, and it's all very interesting, but the country wants Jim Mattis to talk about his experience.

And I want him to talk about what happened in the Trump administration.

So he, for reasons that are understandable and legitimate, especially for a former general officer, he believes that he should keep his mouth shut for a while so that the people who are left behind inside the administration can do their jobs without without him making it more difficult.

But, you know, we spoke because he wants to talk about his book.

And I spent a lot of time with him in Stanford, out where he lives in Washington state, long walks, you know, basically making the argument like, you know what?

I want to go through what one of those moments looks like.

This is from the piece.

You're walking along the Columbia River, and he says, my model, one of my models, is George Washington.

Washington's idea of leadership was that first you listen, then you learn, then you help, and only then do you lead.

It is a somewhat boring progression, but it's useful.

What you try to do in that learning phase is find common ground.

And so, Jeff, you say, so on one end of the spectrum is George Washington, and at the other end is Donald Trump?

And then you're right.

Mattis smiled.

It's a beautiful river, isn't it?

I used to swim it all the time when I was a kid.

Strong current.

Yeah.

That's what this is like.

Yeah.

I mean, it was very passive-aggressive, or it's very oblique.

And he's trying to adhere to a, like I said, I think he's trying to adhere to a self-imposed rule that's very hard to carry through.

I said to him when he goes on his book tour and people line up to ask him questions, they're going to ask about Donald Trump.

But why does that question matter?

What do you think that we're going to get if Jim Mattis said suddenly, okay, I'm going to let you go.

Here it is.

I think, as a voter, as a citizen, I want to know if the Secretary of Defense, for the first two years of the Trump administration, believes that Donald Trump is unfit to command.

I think it's a very important question.

I think

if you're somebody high, high, high up in the national security apparatus and you doubt the president's ability to lead us in wartime

or be in charge of our military, or be in charge more to the point of our nuclear arsenal, then you are duty duty-bound to tell your fellow citizens and voters, if this person is standing for election again, what you think.

I mean,

it seems awfully obvious to me that that is a basic obligation that

surmounts the obligation to keep quiet.

If he thinks that the president is a threat.

If you have first-hand understanding of the president's decision-making

and beliefs,

And if you have reached the conclusion in your own mind that this man is not fit emotionally, mentally, cognitively, morally,

whatever framework you want to use, if he is not fit to be in charge of our national defense, then for God's sakes, tell us.

But don't we know the answer?

Because he won't answer you.

We can sit around and guess all day long.

But if he wanted to say to you, Jeff, he's fine.

He's the president.

Then he would have said that, right?

He knows what you're trying to say.

He's a smart man.

You're asking,

you know, a reporter is asking a reporter why you're trying to get a direct answer from a source.

I mean, you know,

I want a direct answer.

It is a question to me of, at this point.

And by the way, I recognize that he, you know, he wants to talk about the book and he wants to talk about leadership.

So what I wrote in the piece, which you can find at theatlantic.com.

And you should.

And you should.

What I wrote in the piece is that at some point before November 3rd, 2020, just let us know.

Right.

Let us know who you're voting for.

That would be useful.

And, you know, and maybe it's a naive hope that people who are on the fence about Donald Trump would say, oh, Jim Mattis thinks that you can't trust Donald Trump with nuclear weapons.

I'm going to take that on board.

Well, it seems like when Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama over John McCain, John McCain was running as the war hero and his judgment.

And Powell was saying, as a military leader, as a Secretary of State,

I think Obama actually could do it as better than McCain.

It seems like this would be much more powerful if it were against.

You're talking about, I mean, you're talking about John McCain and Barack Obama.

The gap that separates them is not the gap that separates Donald Trump from other politicians.

Put it that way.

I do wonder, though.

I mean, he

it seems like he can't maybe avoid the question, but he also doesn't want to avoid getting asked the question.

I'm glad you noticed that.

because if somebody truly didn't want to be asked,

they wouldn't put themselves in the position to be asked.

I assume that when you pitched him on doing this, you told him you wanted to talk about Trump, right?

Yes.

Right.

I mean, I love talking about Marcus Aurelius, too, and I love talking about command and feedback loops.

I think this stuff is very interesting.

As a manager, I think it's very interesting.

But

look,

he was the most important member and most honored member of this cabinet.

He quit in protest.

I mean, going back to your point, there's some stuff here that's subtext and there's some stuff that's pretty text.

Yeah.

I mean, you read his resignation letter.

This is not a guy happy with Donald Trump.

It's written in a very polite tone, but

you know what he thinks of Donald Trump.

Yeah, and the Wall Street Journal ran this week an excerpt from the book.

That's the prologue from the book.

That's the prologue.

It has a line.

A polemicist role is not sufficient for a leader.

He knows what he's doing.

He's sub-tweeting and he's trolling a little bit.

Although you had to introduce him to what the concept of sub-tweeting was.

Look, not everybody knows what sub-tweeting was.

But

does he want it both ways?

That's the negative way of framing it.

Yeah, maybe.

Is he straining against

his self-imposed rule not to criticize a sitting president because he thinks that it's important that people understand Donald Trump's

downsides.

Yes.

It's not, I mean, I have a lot of sympathy in one sense for Jim Mattis's dilemma.

He's old-fashioned.

He doesn't want to criticize a sitting president.

You'll notice that he criticized Barack Obama in the book fairly freely, not in a personal tone, but just decisions.

So he doesn't have a problem criticizing presidents.

He just thinks that he,

and he said this rather directly to me, that undermining a sitting president is not in the best interest of the country.

On the other hand, that conflicts with his what I'm going to assume, and again, this is an assumption, assume is his desire to see Donald Trump not be returned to office because he

believes, and his own resignation in protest makes it clear he believes that Donald Trump is not a great president.

Aaron Powell, and he's, of course, not the only person who's holding to this kind of duty-bound silence.

Barack Obama himself has mostly been quiet on Trump.

Barack Obama has been even quieter, except for a couple of moments right in the midterms, I guess.

And there was a statement maybe two weeks ago that was pretty clearly critical of Trump.

By the way, interesting point, Barack Obama has been getting a lot of criticism from people on his own team

saying, like, when has it become truly a crisis?

When are you going to actually say anything?

I think Barack Obama also knows, and Jim Mattis might know this as well, that the people who were supporting Donald Trump are not going to wake up one morning and say, well, if Barack Obama doesn't want me to support Donald Trump, then I'm not going to do it.

If you are a committed Trump voter, I don't think Obama will be able to do it.

No, no, no, no.

And Obama's, you know, Obama's smart about it, too.

He's thinking my piling on is only going to firm up the base.

Maybe he's being political and calculating in that.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I do feel like, though, we talked about how we haven't had the moment yet where this might matter.

But

there was a point in the administration early out where Rex Tillerson, who was then Secretary of State, and Mattis and John Kelly, Homeland Security and then chief of staff, had made this sort of pact that one of them would always be in D.C.

at all times, so that they would always mind Trump.

They're all gone.

It is not clear that there has been an effect of that.

I think Trump and a lot of Trump supporters would look at that and say, well, maybe this was all kind of noise that was being made, and you didn't need these adults in the room.

Yeah, but I think the question is not whether you want adults in the room.

I think the answer to that is yes.

The question is how effective are any adults in the room?

Right.

Maybe that's what it is.

And I think that we've been, as a country, we've been lucky for the past three years in one sense, which is that

we have had crises, but most of them have been manufactured by the president himself.

We

are not looking at the Russian invasion of the Baltics.

We're not looking at a hot war between mainland China and Taiwan.

We haven't seen a full-blown Israel-Hezbollah or Israel-Iran war.

We haven't seen very aggressive deployment or testing of North Korean long-range missiles,

all the sorts of things that could trigger an actual crisis.

So I think

we've been lucky, and we don't know what will happen inside a White House when he's faced with a really crushing and fast-moving international crisis.

Yeah, I mean, I just feel like sometimes we can get caught up in, like, well, what could happen with the Trump presidency?

We've been in that since he was running.

And so far,

I mean, you're right, that none of those outside crises have come.

You never know when they're going to hit.

But maybe

Trump would argue he's lucky and we're lucky.

Or Trump might argue that he's actually kept the crises from coming.

Well, he's made more crises than he stopped.

And one could argue that his handling of North Korea is creating a longer-term crisis.

Right.

But one that might seem like a lot of people.

Certainly, look, by the way,

his unilateral decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, as flawed as that might have been,

created unnecessary tension in the Middle East, and we still haven't seen the full consequences of that tension.

I just think we're, I mean, I just, this is my old subject, foreign affairs and national security.

I just think we're skating on thin ice.

I think we're skating along and it's a nice lake and it's a nice day and the ice is much thinner than we think.

And so what you want to know is when the, when, when the ice cracks, can the president swim?

And

it would be nice to have

people around him with vast knowledge and vast experience.

It does go to this central point, which is in a crisis, does it matter if it's H.R.

McMaster or John Bolton as national security advisor or Esper or Jim Mattis?

Because Donald Trump seems to just make decisions on his own intuitively without briefings, without knowledge, without intelligence.

I mean, certainly he's antagonized the intelligence community, so he certainly is not a person who is taking on board the careful analysis of the intelligence community.

Like I said, I think we're, you know, I think we're dancing right at the dancing

on the thinnest of ice.

Your central question on Mattis is that you feel like he should speak before the election, whether Trump should be able to do that.

I mean, again, let me be careful.

When I was with him, I was thinking, what do I want as a voter?

I understand the national security flaws of this administration, but I think it would be incumbent upon someone who has worked inside, who knows the flaws.

I think it's incumbent upon them to share that information, not even the classified information, just the analysis

his fellow citizens.

Many of them seem to be so crazy.

Aaron Powell, what do you think a second-term president, a re-elected Donald Trump, would be in a way that would be different from what we've seen over the last three years?

Aaron Ross Powell,

probably not as much as some people seem to think because it's already so erratic and it's already so odd and unprecedented in so many ways.

I don't know the answer to that.

Do you feel like he'd be empowered?

There's, you know, like Joe Biden says, we're going to pull out a NATO if Donald Trump is re-elected.

Is that Biden being hyperbolic?

I'm not going to make predictions on that.

I think, yes, obviously, Donald Trump wants to pull out a NATO.

Maybe he would feel free to pull out a NATO.

But that's also possible.

It's also possible that he's going to pull out a NATO next Wednesday because why not?

I don't know if that breakpoint of the election

is decisive.

I think we live every day

not knowing what his policy inclinations are going to be.

The story ends with a quote from Jim Mattis.

I'm going to read it.

There is a period in which I owe my silence.

It's not eternal.

It's not going to be forever.

Is it before November 2020?

What do you think?

I asked that question.

I did not get the answer, obviously.

My guess is

yes,

but it's just a guess.

Depends on conditions, which is to say, if he makes a move to pull out a NATO, remember, Jim Mattis, more than anything else, stands for alliances, stands for strong alliances with Arab states, with Europe, with our friends in South Korea and Japan.

If these alliances are in danger of being permanently ruptured, I can't imagine him not saying something.

But again, Trump has done so much damage to these relationships already, and Jim Mattis hasn't said anything publicly.

So I don't know.

Here's another way of thinking about this.

I think that

a person like Jim Mattis, I'm not just talking about Jim Mattis here, but there are people like Jim Mattis, they don't want to end up as panel filler in MSNBC at three in the afternoon.

They don't want to be just one of these, you know, ex-officials who is

every half hour yelling, the president is crazy, the president is this.

You know, you actually lose your currency.

When everything is dialed up to 11, he's never going to be that.

I can imagine him at some point in the next year saying,

for the following reasons, I think that the Trump foreign policy and national security policy are endangering the United States.

Therefore, I cannot support this person, and I do not think he is fit to lead the United States.

And just leave it at that.

Does that move voters who are pro-Trump?

I don't know.

Maybe it galvanizes more people on the other side.

I don't know.

I actually think, again, now we're going like, I'm going two turns more than I should in one sense that I don't know.

It's a beauty of a podcaster.

I know, I know.

No, no, no.

He might also think, what's the difference?

I mean,

going to the point we were talking about, he might say to himself, I'm not going to move hardcore.

I mean, he's from rural Washington state, eastern Washington.

He knows Trump voters.

Maybe he's thinking, I'm not going to move them anyway.

So why do I have to go and become a Twitter target of Donald Trump?

I have a nice life.

I write books about leadership.

I go fishing on the Columbia River.

I go to the Hoover Institution at Stanford and I teach classes.

This is great.

Sit on corporate boards.

I'm going to go hiking in the summer.

Do I need to be John Brennan, you know, the former CIA director, and be constantly targeted by Donald Trump and getting into flame wars with this guy all the time?

Maybe, and to what end?

You know, maybe that's a maybe that's a thought as well.

I don't know.

I mean, he's,

I know Jim Mattis well, but there are fairly well, but I don't know those secret parts.

Well, I guess we have a year and two months to find out.

Yeah, and I might, and we might pass November 3rd, 2020, and Jim Mattis

hasn't said said a word.

I think one of the things that he'll do is he'll continue sub-tweeting, let's say, in more and more obvious ways.

Look, the entire book is a sub-tweet.

The entire book is about effective leadership.

Everything he holds dear in terms of leadership.

The George Washington quote that you talked about before.

All you have to do is study Donald Trump's leadership style to know that...

that this book is a repudiation of

nobody was crying out for a Jim Mattis book on leadership, but he decided.

I don't know.

I think, you know, you mock, you Eastern elite, you, but there are plenty of people who look at Jim Mattis and say, there's an effective leader.

Maybe I can learn some tips from him.

You know, I mean, have you been to an airport bookstore?

I mean, there's a lot of crappy books.

There's been a lot of crappy management books in those bookstores.

This is a good one.

So why not?

But again, I mean, if there's...

Right now, I don't think the country is necessarily saying what we need more than anything is Jim Mattis leadership tips.

What we need need right now is Jim Mattis moral leadership.

Yeah.

And maybe he would argue that it's the same thing.

Jeff Goldberg, whose article, The Man Who Couldn't Take It Anymore, is up on the Atlantic's website and in the next issue of the magazine.

Thanks for being with us here on Radio Atlantic.

Thank you.

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